FREEDMAN’S BUREAU
On March 3, 1965, Congress passed a bill establishing the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, otherwise known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. The bureau was tasked with the creation of schools across the south. Schools that had been operating in secret were now able to come out into the open, but these openings were subject to blacklash, with school buildings being burned to the ground and teachers harassed and threatened.
Henry C. Eddy, a white Union soldier from Harmony, Illinois, started the first Black school in Spring Hill. He felt it was his duty to return to the South with his family and help to educate the newly freed slaves, who were, in his words, “eager to learn and well behaved.”
The original school opened in September 1865 in an old cowshed. Eddy personally shoveled out the manure and placed wooden planks around the space for his 39 new students. Two weeks later, enrollment had grown to 57 students. Classes continued in the shed while money was raised to build a new school in the church.
A Black man named Jeb Rodon started another school of 16 students in 1865 at a community called Rutherford Creek at the J.B. Bunch Farm on Green Mills Road. The building was moved to the Rippavilla Plantation in Spring Hill, where it was restored in 1993 by Leadership Maury County. Now on display, the school can be found in an open area behind the visitor’s parking lot at the back of the plantation. A census from 1860 shows that there were nine slaves in two slave houses on the Bunch farm and it is believed that one of these cabins was used for the school.
Freedmen’s Bureau in Maury County
Ku Klux Klan and Freedmen’s Schools
Freedmen’s Bank
The Freedmen’s Bank was established as a place where former slaves could have a bank account and be able to store their money. Due to mismanagement and the financial panic of 1873, all Freedmen’s Bank branches in Maury County closed down by 1874. Shortly before its closure, the Columbia branch totaled approximately $20,000 in deposits, and more than $180,000 when combined with the state’s three other branches. The bank’s assets, however, were not protected by the federal government, and many depositors lost their entire life savings, along with the psychological toll it took on freed slaves during post-Civil War times.